[FR-devel] Scintilla replacement for Freeride? (was Newbie to FreeRIDE).

[Euan Mee]

On 7 May 2002, Yohanes Santoso wrote (more or less - I've 
done some fairly heavy editing for brevity):
> I propose putting a decent UI on top of something with the
> flexibility of an emacs. A UI that a beginner can use without
> being overwhelmed, (e.g. one with a simple keybinding that a
> beginner can understand, another keybinding aimed at people
> moving over from emacs, etc) similiar to the way MacOS X
> provides a straightforward UI for Unix that even my mom can
> use, yet it also allows you to drop in to the shell level if
> you want to. 
> 
> In a way, freeride is like emacs in 1970s.  Emacs started as
> an ide, like freeride, but ended up as the defacto lisp
> platform, transcending machine and OS boundaries. Isn't this
> the potential for freeride? (I'll laugh so hard the day there
> is alt.religion.freeride :) ). 
>
> Now for implementation issues: I think Scintilla is great!
> But it's hard to imagine users extending it easily. It has has
> a lexer for many languages, but written in C++, so it can't be
> extended from within freeride. User extensibility is a great
> and important feature. 
>
> Scintilla's also tied too tightly to its GUI. TUIs are dying,
> but still serve some purposes best, e.g. you can use them
> remotely over ssh, run from a single floppy without installing
> anything. 
>
> Curt is right in saying that attempting to replace Scintilla
> could be a waste of time or it could be a wonderful thing. I'd
> go do parallel devel but there are two problems:  
>
> 1. I have never done extensive UI programming much less UI
> designing. 
>
> 2. I can't do the engine by myself (not enough skill, time,
> etc). 
>
> 3. I'm afraid that this'll be a waste of time because perhaps
> in reality there are better ways to have a sane UI and
> capabilities of emacs without this much work. 

I think the third of your two problems is the key one.  (Nobody 
expects the Spanish Inquisition! (c) MPFC :-) )

It seems to me, the key (meta)features you're after for 
FreeRIDE are:

 - fast, straightforward and easy extensibility
 - flexible UI design
 - access to the features from a text-based UI

To my mind, this is a much more approachable problem than 
converting emacs from lisp to Ruby!  After all, it took Stallman 
decades to write emacs, and I hear tell he's quite a capable 
coder! :-)

Perhaps other folk on the list could comment on the feasibility 
and attractiveness of these as (long-term?) design goals for 
FreeRIDE?









Cheers,
     Euan
address@hidden

'I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance,
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance'
 - Ogden Nash